The Yorkshire Artspace Microgrants 2016 form part of the city-wide Year of Making celebrations aiming to promote Sheffield as a city of makers.

This year, Kandy Diamond is one of four artists and makers awarded a Microgrant, each receiving up to £500 to develop their practice & increase public access & engagement with their work.

"This Microgrant is enabling me to run machine knitting workshops from my studio at Persistence Works and these are currently in the planning stage. Preparation for these workshops has involved sourcing knitting machines and tables as well as updating my website to include information about the workshops.

Having looked into the various knitting machines available I decided on the Brother model as they are reliable and have punch-card patterning as well as all the regular functions. This gives scope to offer workshops that work with designing pattern for machine knitting as well as textures and hand manipulation techniques.

Workshops will run on Saturdays with two beginners workshops planned so far, one in July and one in August, details are up on my website including a link to book a place on the workshop.

The next stage is to source a range of yarns for workshop participants to use in creating their own knitted fabrics. I am looking forward to this, as well as to creating samples to use in the teaching of machine knitting in the workshops."

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